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This web site presents
the work of Esther Parada accompanied by texts taken from her writings.
BDM Girl: This image was taken from a photograph of the Bund Deutscher
Mädchen was a Nazi youth organization.
Hayet: A Tunisian woman, she was sent to Munich in 1969 by the Siemens
Company after a training program in Tunis. She works now in Munich has
applied for German citizenship.
Anita Augspurg
(1857-1943):
One of the first German women to win a law degree, went on to found the
German women's voting rights association and was a leading member of the
international women's peace movement.
Heimat
Bayern—für wen?
(Homeland Bavaria—for whom?)
1991
Completed in 1991, Heimat Bayern—fur wen? consists of six 1.8m x
3.7m panels on the facade of the Antikensammlungen (Museum of Antiquities)
at the Königsplatz in Munich, Germany. It was one of six site-specific
installations commissioned by the city of Munich (in conjunction with
the Lenbachhaus State Gallery) to mark the politically charged history
of that site. This grandiose plaza, ringed by neo-classical museums and
monuments, was developed by Ludwig I of Bavaria in the early 1800s to
express his fascination with Greek and Roman culture, and to showcase
his collection of antiquities. In the 1930s the Königsplatz, its
grassy lawns paved over by architects of the Third Reich, became a principal
site of Nazi rallies and processions. The six panels of my Antikensammlungen
installation echoed the niches on the facade of the Glyptothek (museum)
directly opposite, with an important difference: in place of the exclusively
male figures on that building, I chose to represent only women —
because — except for female representatives of abstract ideas such
as the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor or the statue of Bavaria in
Munich — women are among the groups most consistently excluded from
public space. I created a sequence of figures beginning, at either end
of the building, with idealized icons referencing the imperial and fascist
history of the site, and shifting to completely non-traditional or radical
women. Digital technology facilitated the capture and retouching of images
from multiple sources, ranging from museum catalogs and historical texts
to my own photographs. A black-and-white illustration shown as it was
installed on the east wing of the Antikensammlungen, is a good example
of this process. In it, the nontraditional figure of Tunisian immigrant
Hayet, scanned from my (1991) 35-mm transparency, emerges from the figure
of the Nazi Youth League girl (whose Aryan features were idealized under
the Third Reich) scanned from a historical photograph.
In documenting this work I show a red-fur-clad model posing on the steps
of the Antikensammlungen—a scene I encountered the day after the
opening when I went back to document the installation— as an ironic
comment on my efforts to move beyond stereotypical representations of
women in public space."
—Excerpt from Parada's essay, "Taking Liberties: Digital Revision
as Cultural Dialogue," Leonardo, Vol. 26, No. 5, pp. 445-450, 1993
Artist Statement
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